That use of staff-generated, journalistic news content will set the site apart from competitors such as Autotrader.com and Cars.com, said KC Crain, vice president and group publisher for Crain Communications, overseeing the project.

The idea is to cut through the clutter of information, he said.

"We're looking at this as a more friendly way to shop," Crain said, "like talking to your neighbor over the fence about shopping for a car."

The shopautoweek.com venture represents an expansion for Crain Communications, with 40 employees hired to work on the project and another 12 to be hired.

The company was awarded a tax credit from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority in January, based on a business investment of $3.6 million and the creation of 50 jobs over the course of five years. The tax credit of $443,000 over five years was approved.

Backing the project financially are advertising commitments signed with the three domestic auto manufacturers and the major international automakers, he said. The automakers purchase advertisements adjacent to staff-generated stories and data about individual cars. Advertisements also accompany stories about car shopping tips, automotive news and lifestyle stories such as ways to save fuel.

Being able to keep the advertising elements of the site distinct from the editorial content is a key to the site, Crain said.

As the third generation of leadership in the family-owned publishing company, Crain said that keeping advertising and editorial content separate is something the company knows well.

"That's something we've been doing for 50 years," he said.

The site is integrated with Facebook and stores a person's car-buying searches in a "notebook" feature available for people to keep information about the cars they've researched.

Integrating geographic information about dealerships near the person searching for the car is an element to be installed in a future update. However, the information about each car does offer a function for a person to have contact information sent to a dealer.

Consumers won't be buying and selling cars through shop autoweek.com as they can with Autotrader.com and Cars.com, the two largest companies in the space.

Autotrader.com, majority-owned by Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises Inc., dominates the segment with 15.8 million unique monthly page views and $738 million in 2010 revenue.

Behind that is Cars.com, owned by Chicago-based Classified Ventures LLC as a joint venture between five media companies, which had 2010 revenue of $400 million.

The overall sector of third-party websites offering consumer information about cars has become extremely important, with dealerships getting as much as two-thirds of all the new car buyer leads from such sites, said Jody Stidham, global practice director for Detroit-based Urban Science, which tracks Internet sales leads for auto manufacturers and provides consulting on how to convert those leads into sales.

Between 15 percent and 30 percent of all car sales are generated by consumers shopping online and being routed to dealers, she said. And buyers still don't trust the manufacturers' sites.

"We've found that consumers favor the third-party sites, finding that they're not biased and let people shop multiple vehicles at one time," Stidham said.

The key to pleasing the consumers, the dealers and the manufacturers is to capture the consumer with content that's useful and help them find a dealership in an efficient way.

Mitch Golub, who founded Cars.com in 1997 and remains its president, said it's very difficult for companies to remain competitive in the consumer advice space.

In 2001, he said, there were 36 websites at the National Automobile Dealers Association conference, and there were six the following year.

"Today, a business like Cars.com spends hundreds of millions of dollars on our consumer website, on our consumer businesses, serving our dealers, and promoting our website," he said. "That's the type of investment you have to make to be of importance to the advertising customers, the dealership and the manufacturer."

Developing mobile applications and forming relationships with specific car dealers are endeavors that take time and money. The company has more than 1,000 employees, 500 of them salespeople in local markets and 250 of them developing new technology.

Handling classified ads and working with the used car market does make up a majority of the company's revenue, though new car reviews and advice is a growing part of the business.

Golub said consumers are happy with the online car shopping options that exist today, and exceeding the bar will be difficult.

"But if someone can do a better job, we'll copy them," he said. "We'll be fast followers if there's a better way to do it."

Allyson Estes, director of industry relations for Autotrader.com, said the company's editorial content continues to be competitive with other sites and is a key to the operation, attracting consumer attention.

"We've built a very robust editorial staff, and we're sending them to the auto shows, test driving the cars and informing consumers," she said. "And we make the delineation (between paid and editorial content) very clear."

She had not reviewed shopautoweek.com thoroughly enough to comment on it directly, but said, overall, bringing more information to consumers benefits the entire automotive industry.

Bringing more employees to the company's Detroit office, Crain said, is important in terms of being part of the city's resurgence.

"With the Detroit 2.0 movement and Dan Gilbert's Webward Avenue, along with all the advertising companies that are coming downtown, it's exciting to be part of the city's rebirth and to be bringing tech employees to the city," he said.